The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job.
We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering. And then on retirement, people would still have their hobbies and passion projects they had been working on their entire life.
That is the biggest rock in the bucket. Smaller rocks include social media use, diet, exercise, whether the person is in a toxic home environment, mental health, or has children.
I have ADHD and I often struggle with having the energy to do anything outside of work. So I try to optimise my life to give me the most energy that I can have. I eat really healthy; high protein, high fibre, low saturated fat. I try to keep my social media use low, using ScreenZen. I meditate. I do resistance exercise a few times a week.
But even still, I find that my mind is exhausted part of a way through a workday, usually by 14:00-15:00. Maybe that's because I'm a software engineer.
I don't know how to fix it. But I'd really appreciate an extra day a week off, even at the cost of some remuneration. I love my work, but I don't want it to feel like it's the only thing I have going.
> they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering
This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.
I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
People should probably work less but the idea that this will generate productive activity is a rationalization against all evidence.
> I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
You lock people for decades in the madhouse which leaves only escapism as a coping mechanism and then act surprised when they continue to escape. Make the experiment with a clean slate: a group of children raised to be empowered by creation and creativity, having generous allowances to experiment and not burdened with work or brain rot. Did I just describe rich kids? Anyway.
And what’s “a lot of free time” anyway?
More than 10% of 18-25 year olds are considered NEETs. They haven't experienced anything but sitting at school for 25 hours a week with zero responsibilities. Yet none of them do anything useful with their free time. Funnily, this affects both poor and rich kids equally
> More than 10% of 18-25 year olds are considered NEETs. They haven't experienced anything but sitting at school for 25 hours a week with zero responsibilities.
Being dumped by absent parents and having lack of pointers/goals in life is not
> raised to be empowered by creation and creativity, having generous allowances to experiment and not burdened with work or brain rot.
in my book.
Cease this wild extrapolation, which starts at dementia, passes through a casual myth called "brain rot", and ends at games. I like games and I like being idle. I don't like the judgmental concept of "productive activity" and I don't think that arbitrarily occupying yourself, even if you produce something, is inherently worthy and good. I produce certain things with my ass, gimme a medal.
> You lock people for decades in the madhouse which leaves only escapism as a coping mechanism and then act surprised when they continue to escape.
This is so good I feel the need of framing it!
> Did I just described rich kids?
You just described Lord Of The Flies.
Be mindful of fundamental human nature and how it shapes everything we do, including all our social constructs. Few people are, which make mindlessness the dominant modus operandi.
Lord of the Flies was a fictional novel, it never happened, it’s not real and shouldn’t be used to inform your thinking.
Especially when real life instances of groups of young children being stranded without adult help exist and play out in ways directly opposite of the novel’s central thesis.
You can make any society work if you're writing fiction.
For example, Star Trek is Roddenberry's idea of a utopia. A benevolent dictator with his happy ship of comrades all rowing together. (But hey, I enjoyed watching it!)
STTNG amps that up even further. It got so heavy-handed with it I lost interest in it.
I'm not understanding how you're extrapolating Lord of the Flies from what they're saying. A key part of "raised to be empowered by creation and creativity" would involve parents and other adults to do that. I haven't read the book in a while, were they stranded on the island with their parents?
True mindfulness is to know when the machine breaks, why it breaks and to recognize known flaws of the machine, for example to assume that all others are automatons running on low-energy heuristics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
> Be mindful of fundamental human nature and how it shapes everything we do, including all our social constructs. Few people are, which make mindlessness the dominant modus operandi.
What is the fundamental human nature in your opinion?
Adapation
So many pointed jabs.
There are both groups. Some people are busy now and will remain busy. Others have no hobbies, and will continue to have none.
Which is to say figure out something you can do in your free time so when you have more it can fill that time. Even if it is only a few minutes per week that you can do something. There are a lot of options. Volunteer, build wooden boxes, paint pictures: there are many great options. The point isn't to be productive or useful (though volunteering is and I recommend it for at least some of your free time), it is to have something to do with your time.
> There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time.
I can't recall which studies they were, but I was under the impression that with a sudden expansion of free time, the earliest productivity gains don't occur until months later at the earliest.
I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, and those that acquired sudden wealth from inheritance / lottery / stocks / etc...
There tends to be a decompression stage after leaving work environment that didn't suit the person, then a deconstruction / rebuilding / searching stage afterwards.
I think it's also common for large lottery winners to become depressed because they have trouble searching for what to do afterwards.
Anecdotes obviously aren't data, but from my own experience going some time jobless after my last startup I was basically useless for the first three months. By month four I started looking for some things to do and excuses to regularly leave the house. By month 9 I had a bunch of side projects and hobbies going on. Some productive, some artistic, some just screwing around.
Then I got a job I liked, and while some of the hobbies were still quite active for the first two months or so they've all come to rest now. Still trying to figure out how to get a better work-life balance again, because I quite liked those hobbies
Yep, the statement is so bad with a pattern of "because most won't, then all won't", which commonly used during birth rate issues too. It's either ignorant or malicious with hidden agenda behind.
Giving employees 1 week of free time? That's nothing, and nothing will change too as a result. Give them a whole month of free time? I bet they will make some small, short term projects, even doing hobbies like gaming, fishing, cooking or golfing where it wasn't available before.
> Giving employees 1 week of free time? That's nothing, and nothing will change too as a result. Give them a whole month of free time? I bet they will make some small, short term projects, even doing hobbies like gaming, fishing, cooking or golfing where it wasn't available before.
*confused in European, again*
Hey, if only there was an entire continent of hundreds of millions of people who typically have 5 weeks of paid vacation per year or more so that we could check this and see what happens?
I'm not sure about other countries in europe but in Germany your employer can and will try to prevent you from starting a company. Some are more lenient and don't care if it's another industry, but same? Usually that is not going to happen.
So the cheapest and safest way to open a company is closed to a lot of employees, even with UBI.
You have confused 5 weeks (across a year) for 5 weeks (contiguous), this isn't speciality european confusion it's the regular garden variety.
5 weeks, even contiguous is not enough to unwind from decades of job induced stress. I took some time off between jobs, and it was a solid 3 months before I noticed major improvements.
There's tons of people over here taking 3 or 4 weeks contiguous, especially if they have children. That is in addition to other vacations around christmas etc. It's definitely not 5 separate weeks.
I don't think there's a lot of things that one could do in 5 weeks, but where 4 weeks would be too short.
Tons? Hyperbole? Are they teachers or something? That amount of leave in one go is basically unheard of, with the exception of maternity leave I don't know anyone who's been on leave for more than 3 weeks as a single block.
This is also taking from that same 5 week leave bucket people have available per annum, if they're taking 4 weeks then they have 5 days to last the remainder of the year. Not that crazy, but I have literally never even met a single person who does this let alone knowing tons.
I don't know if this is a Norway exclusive thing or if some other countries have similar laws aswell, but we have the right to take three continuous weeks of vacation during summer. You don't have to take the continuous weeks, but in my experience most people do
yes, the exact point I've mentioned, feels like an organized effort to reduce the importance of free time. "Look at those European with astonishing 5 weeks of paid vacation and they aren't productive at all!" argument without getting the point:
* no source to back them up, and equalize everyone without considering some will be productive
* equating all non-money making or enterpreneur activities as non-productive and equal to doomscrolling
* ignoring other limitations like living space size, funds availability, opportunity, license or regulation
5 weeks is nothing over a year.
> I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants,
The failure of UBI trials to show these effects has been one of the noteworthy developments in the UBI topic in recent years.
There were several studies that tried really hard to demonstrate that UBI would increase the rate of business creation and similar metrics. The last one I remember reading was trying to show that the long-term cash recipients reported a marginally higher rate of thinking about maybe starting a business, but they weren't actually doing it.
As I remember it, there were four kinds of UBI trials:
- Low UBI, short term
- Low UBI, long term
- High UBI, short term
- High UBI, long term
Both low UBI kinds did little except provide a little better food/medical security for poor folks.
High UBI short term mostly only led to people either saving or spending the money immediately.
High UBI long term was the only one where the effect I was talking about showed up. Most people carried on as they did, some reduced hours, there was an increase in people switching jobs, and an increasing in people leaving work to get a degree.
I also remember the difference between the first three kinds and the last kind led to confusion between UBI trials.
Admittedly I haven't looked in a few years, so I'll have to check again.
Starting a business can be horrifically expensive, complicated, and risky. You have to spend a good few months researching all the things you need to do before you actually do it. And most people don't even know what questions to ask.
Some people will grow up in households where their parents understand basic law, finance, and business bureaucracy. They may already be part of a network with similar individuals in their cohort.
There's also the informal culture - knowing when you can push and maybe exploit vs knowing when to fold and play by the rules.
Other people come to it completely cold. They don't know the basics, don't understand the requirements, have no experience of the culture, don't even know what the words mean.
This is another reason why UBI isn't enough. If you want people to be more entrepreneurial you need a practical culture that supports that. Investing in them financially is a good first step, but it's not a complete solution.
> Starting a business can be horrifically expensive, complicated, and risky.
Or just go door to door offering maid service or yard service or cleanup service or handyman service or tutoring service or ...
I think those that would start a business, self-select themselves out of any crowd that would receive UBI before the experiment.
It's such an unimaginative metric. First, we lump all jobs together into one bag. Depending on who you are some jobs are an actual joy whole others are absurdly demanding. We have zero dialog about the correct number of hours for each.
Lots of jobs (both physically and mentally) require slacking off half the shift. I've seen quite a few that on paper require 8 hours of top tier athletic performance. It might be possible to train a person to accomplish that. The work schedule looks nothing like a training program.
To grow, mental and physical challenges have to push people to their limit for X hours over Y days where X and Y depend a lot on what it is one does and their point of exhaustion. If you are not exhausted you aren't growing. When you are exhausted you should be resting. Rest should be exactly the right duration.
If people are never challenged physically, mentally (and perhaps socially) they will decline and eventually the lack of physical fitness will eat away their mental performance just like a lack of mental challenge will ruin physical performance.
There is no discussion about the duration or frequency of shifts.
If you look at it strictly from a greed and exploitation perspective it is a dumb idea to pay someone for 8 hours if it isn't possible to do more than 5 hours of work. It is dumb to have people work 5 days if they are used up after 3. It is dumb to have 2 days of weekend if the employee is not recharged. The collective goal was to exploit them until retirement. If they cant even be allowed to grow stronger it is a truly dumb schedule.
I had a job once that involved a weekly truck full of 75 kg bags of flour. About 10 employees were unable to do a single bag, about 10 could do 1-5. Then there was one guy who did the other 150 bags. Not a coincidence it was the same guy who put them in the mixer. Say 10 000 kg. The world record most weight lifted in a day is half a million kg or say 6500 bags.
They calculated top memory sports people are on average 5000 times better at remembering things than untrained people. They weren't born like that nor did it just happen suddenly.
Lots of people want to start their own business but they are terrified by the amount of work and level of uncertainty. It doesn't seem like we want people to start their own business. We need them to but it looks more like we've made it intentionally complicated. Complicated enough that you probably shouldn't invest in them.
There is also the angle of people able to support you. If everyone has 4 day weekends you really should ask them to help you. If it is only 2 days you'd best not bother.
> I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
This is why I am so thankful that I grew up before the days of social media and devices. I have direct first hand knowledge that the world does not end because some feed hasn't been checked in the past 5 minutes. I am forced to hear others doom scrolling their feeds and listening to the disjointed audio from short clips looping or getting interrupted to get to the next one, and I am constantly reminded of those that would sit on the sofa with the remote constantly flipping channels. Nothing was on the screen long enough to really see what was on, but just enough they decided not what they wanted to see. It's like the exact same personality cranked to 11.
Anecdotal evidence, but once I stopped working I spent _much_ more time doing things I wouldn’t do before, such as running and cooking new recipes for me and my partner. I also went out more to play board games.
The issue of work isn’t the time it consumes, but _the energy_. Scrolling social media costs virtually no energy, hence it being a way to spend time after work when you’re already tired.
No, statistically it's exactly what happens. People have more initiative and produce meaningful outcomes when they own part of their time. You do need to account for what isn't measured in capital. Off the top of my head:
- Caretaking
- Community and organization
- Art ventures
- Political involvement
All of which are meaningful parts of as functioning society, but almost invisible to the capitalistic eye. Some of these (caretaking for example) are obstacles to one industry being maximally profitable, so sometimes they're structurally pushed out by the simple act of prioritizing company interest over decades.
You'll notice they were also kind of stereotypically married women's activities when women used to be homemakers in majority, and that went away when women of working age joined the workforce, i.e. lost control over how they distributed their working day.
That's just what you claim.
Me and 50 years of trials and studies
> The scheme also gave some participants “the possibility to try and live their dreams”, Blomberg-Kroll said. “Freelancers and artists and entrepreneurs had more positive views on the effects of the basic income, which some felt had created opportunities for them to start businesses.”
It also encouraged some participants to get more involved in society, by undertaking voluntary work, for example. “Some found the guaranteed income increased the possibility for them to do things like providing informal care for their family or their neighbours,” said one of the researchers, Christian Kroll.
- https://weall.org/resource/finland-universal-basic-income-pi...
> Involvement in the Mincome project didn’t cause a significant labour force reduction in Dauphin, as some critics of the program feared. The program’s approach to reducing payments based on income meant that it was better for participants to remain working as opposed to leaving the work force. Most participants continued to work.
Two notable groups of people did use Mincome to stay out of the work force. New mothers chose to stay at home longer with their babies and teenaged boys stayed in school instead of dropping out before Grade 12 to help support their families. The opportunity for students to stay in school was reflected in the higher graduation numbers and university enrollments seen during the experiment.
- https://humanrights.ca/story/manitobas-mincome-experiment
> When asked about the ease of combining paid work with care responsibilities, the average score increased from 2.76 to 3.58 on a 1 (‘very difficult’) to 5 (‘very easy’) scale. 60% of employees reported that balancing care responsibilities had become easier. Similarly, the experience of balancing employment with social life benefited, with an average reported increase from 2.9 to 3.78 (again with 1 as ‘very difficult’, and 5 as ‘very easy’).
- UK's 2023 four-day pilot study (page 39) https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/The-results...
> Researchers said this was partly due to remote working but there were other signs that people were more environmentally conscious. Time spent on household recycling, walking and cycling and buying eco-friendly products saw “a small but significant” increase.
- World Economic Forum on 4-day weeks https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/10/surprising-benefits-...
This has been my experience as well. My stock advice to people who want to save money is to simply work more. Not because the marginal hours will be meaningfully worth it, but because it stops them from spending money by default.
I don't think there is evidence of that. You would need long term changes to schedules so that people accommodate for the free time. That isn't the case if you have three weeks off.
Otherwise people would indeed do the exact same stuff they would do in their free time. In certain perspectives, that is maximising productivity in essence.
That was not my experience. I devoted more of my work to less productive tasks. Call it craftsmanship. I made a LOT more art, wrote more code, biked more. It is crazy what you can do with more energy.
If anything I wasted less time because I did not finish the day needing to recover from a demanding job.
This is only anecdata
> This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.
Wrong.
> I know many people with a lot of free time...
Not a valid argument for, or against anything.
You probably mean to say you already know humans are just 'lazy' and the evidence for it is vibes, which is completely and totally sufficient for you but for anyone who thinks otherwise - they better come up with evidence that isn't just vibes.
i think people trying to argue that we would be more productive is a symptom of the productivity disease. where all we value is productivity and thats the only way we can justify more non-work time. i personally just think we should all have more time to do what we want, whether that is being productive on personal projects, talking to people, playing games, or doing nothing. happier people right? why should 10% of the richest people enslave the rest of us.
edit: forget dems v pups, black v white, democracy v communism, its all about class struggle, probably always has been. i bet those 10% can pick and choose how productive they want to be and how much spare time they have lol.
> its all about class struggle
That's the foundation of Marxist theory.
In America, however, anyone can become wealthy.
Marxims is such a lazy evaluation system. Discarding culture altogether, refusing analysis of religion, its basically a Proof Of Non work, when it comes to sociology and analysis
I was all with you right up until the class conflict stuff. Nobody's enslaving anybody. Well that's not true, we're mostly enslaving ourselves. There are endless easy opportunities in life. For instance go teach English in Saudi Arabia and you'll earn around $60k a year which doesn't sound like much until you account for the fact you pay 0% in taxes and have a cost of living well under $1k a month.
Just live frugally, dump your excess into index funds, and you'll likely be a millionaire in a decade. Yeah it's Saudi Arabia, but the price is right. And from that point one never needs to work another day in their life if they don't want, since typical returns on a million $ are more than enough to pay for cost of living in like 90% of the world.
Yet approximately 0% of people will take this advice. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of people generally prefer to seek the easiest, most popular, lowest friction choices. Options like I'm mentioning here only exist precisely because most people won't take them. But it's a sort of paradox in that there's absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so.
> There are endless easy opportunities in life. For instance go teach English in Saudi Arabia and you'll earn around $60k a year which doesn't sound like much until you account for the fact you pay 0% in taxes and have a cost of living well under $1k a month.
Just be born a single male with knowledge of Saudi, English and ability to teach and then lock yourself away for 10 years in Arab world living like a second class citizen. What the fuck am I even reading? Let me guess, for women it’s “just open an OnlyFans account”? I swear to God, the shit I read on this forum when it comes to things outside of tech.
0% of people will take your advice because it's half-baked and you didn't actually research the requirements (hint: simply knowing English is not enough) to get such a job. Or you purposefully omitted the requirements to make your point that it's "easy".
A word of advice: if you want to give advice, at least be realistic.
"Sacrifice your one and only precious youth for happiness" is the TL;DR here. Also, the Saudi's are very choosy about who gets to show up and teach - a girl I went to high school actually went - after she got her masters in education.
I'm not saying some people shouldn't do this, but everybody can't. I (mid 40s male living in Canada) used to be a huge proponent of living beneath your means and did in fact sock away 20% of my income into investments. But the K shaped job market, real estate market, and cost of living in general has made that far harder to do today. I had a dirt cheap apartment in downtown Toronto ~2004-2007 before I bought a place, managed to have a fun youth AND save by simply not participating in lifestyle creep (the number of young people I knew that blew money on fancy German cars and other bling as tech salaries started to grow still makes me shake my head).
But that same apartment I rented for $700/month is now $2500 and requires a letter of employment (read they only will rent to professionals) to apply for.
Leaving the place you have lived your whole life, the place where your family and personal life is and going to another country for work for 5 to 10 years will destroy the past life they had.
After 5 10 years that person will almost become part Saudi due to living in another country. And after he comes back no one will be that close, even close family members will feel something different due to the person being away/(out of physical touch) for 10 years
> Nobody's enslaving anybody.
> Saudi Arabia
I have some news for you.
maybe class struggle was the wrong terminology, but the more i see of problems in the world the more i start to think its about money/power vs "all the other busywork" we get bombarded with daily.
The 10% richest people create the jobs for you by cleverly investing you know
The people I know who have done it best are a friend's parents. They are both general practitioners and just gradually scaled back how many hours per week they worked, and gradually filled the time with various community and outdoor activities (church, choir, book clubs, hiking, biking, etc). My aim is to do the same, but I think I need to shift from being a tech employee to some kind of consulting to do that since scaling back is seen as weakness in corporate culture.
> The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering.
I don't buy this construction of the workday where spending 50% of your awake hours at work leaves people so exhausted they can't do anything else with their lives, but if we changed that to 38% of their waking hours they'd be so bored that they be starting businesses and volunteering all over. That's not even consistent with your own experience of being exhausted halfway through the work day. Two extra hours per day isn't going to translate to launching a new business or volunteer effort.
You hinted at the real problem: Most people don't have the time management skills and motivation that they think they do. Remove a couple hours of work per week from most people's lives and those hours will get redistributed to mostly leisure time. Some of it more productive than other options (socializing with the community, working on hobbies).
Are you considering jobs that are extraordinarily demanding? What if you're an ER Doctor? Or an Air Traffic Controller? Or someone getting started in their career in their early 20s, when most of us possess the unique combination of a lack of life experience that would prevent exploitation and ambition? For these jobs, I can easily sympathize with the idea that after a workday they're too tired to develop personally. Moreover, it's a manager's job to sap every ounce of productivity out of a person. Modern technology increasingly makes this possible. Even seemingly mundane jobs like working in a call center can be so orchestrated that using the bathroom makes them fall behind. And productivity has done nothing but rise for decades!
I also don't see how your final paragraph really refutes rather than just restates their opinion. Hobbies produce projects and business ventures all the time. Someone also has to find some way or another to socialize with the community. Volunteering is a great way to do that.
Jobs that you want to do vs jobs that you have to do are entirely different levels of motivating and result in completely different energy levels for people.
If I have to do a job I hate for the rest of my life I would eternally be low energy. If I could do the thing I loved every day, the thing I truly wanted to do, I would get up excited every day and would have high energy throughout.
Having more free time, yes people would get bored. But the resulting things that they work on would be things that invigorate them.
Fortunately, there is an immense variety of jobs to choose from.
People sometimes underestimate how much work goes into a new business. The idea that you'll fill "spare time" with a business is laughable.
(I'm not thinking of a making-money-from-my-hobby side gig, but an actual business.)
You can do a side-hustle in spare time, but an actual business, one that pays salaries every month takes enormous effort.
"9-5" jobs in America are anything but. Since the popularity of smartphones people are reachable 24/7 and employers are taking full advantage.
Hourly employees have it even worse. When your schedule varies week to week and even on your "day off" your employer may be constantly reaching out trying to bully you into taking another shift, it's very hard to maintain regular non-work activities. Perhaps you have friends who work similar schedules to you, but good luck going to a sports team or club that meets Thursdays at 6 when you don't know if you'll be available then until 12 hours before if ever.
That's a 24% change which is well above the threshold of significance.
If there's a schedule to your tiredness then can probably reschedule it. This is a lesson I've discovered to good effect. [Side note: 2-3pm is probably due to food/glucose/insulin levels - its worth investigating]
Don't be fooled by tiredness. You can be mentally tired but not physically tired. These are not opposites. You can be physically tired in one aspect but not another.
You can be mentally tired but because you like to paint, then painting will regenerate you. It will make you less tired after you paint or even better: have you now appropriately tired that you properly sleep due to that tiredness.
Tired is not tired. You be tired in one way and not in another. This blanket use of the word isn't helpful and leaves a lot of potential left behind as you sit on the couch "tired".
It's hard for me to even contemplate having "nothing to do." I haven't had paid work for many, many years, yet I don't feel like I have any spare time at all.
I lay down and close my eyes (and sometimes nap) pretty much every day for like 20 min. When the mid afternoon slump hits, instead of trying to fight it or use caffeine I just lay down. Does wonders for my energy levels afterwards.
Also ADHD here, I have the same problem.
The only way I can get anything meaningful done outside of work is to do it before work.
Those first few hours of the day are precious, as far as energy goes. Or attention, or will.
On a related note, I put Q2 of Eisenhower Matrix (important but not urgent, i.e. the stuff you want to get done "someday" but keep putting off indefinitely... i.e. your hopes and dreams) at the front of the day, because Q1 (urgent and important) basically forces you to do it and requires no special attention.
To put it bluntly, the long term stuff needs to be scheduled and consistently acted upon, or the default outcome will be very depressing.
I schedule it first thing, every morning.
never heard of the eisenhower matrix but my time management resonates with what you wrote. ill try forcing q2 stuff earlier as well as ive noticed it never gets done! yes, the default outcome is depressing.
Since you're already in this optimizing mindset -- do as much as you can to improve/optimize your mitochondria and lots of these issues get better.
I would like to know about your ADHD tricks and which ones had the most impact.
When the mind exhaustion hits, the day ends. I go ride my bicycle. I stopped pretending I can be productive on another person’s schedule. This is good if your job allows it.
Half of those hobbies also would gestate into new jobs and businesses within a year.. turns out if given free time, some people do get busy..
"I have ADHD and I often struggle with having the energy to do anything outside of work".
Ritalin can help tremendously with that.
I've been doing a 4 day work week and it certainly helps quite a bit. I worry I have gotten too used to it now though.
Yeah, not buying this entirely. People love slacking off in their free time, after some intense period its the easiest way to relax. Hard manual labor should have mental exercises as resting and reverse.
Its completely on people. Who the heck was ever told to work like crazy whole life, do nothing more, and let their personality formed up till mid 20s slowly evaporate? I certainly never heard that. Its your and mine responsibility to keep our life interesting, bring up challenges for good old struggle and overcoming, fostering resilient personalities, find passions. Nobody forces you to work till you drop with gun next to your head, do they.
These aren't some empty words, I can attest it myself - moved myself half across the Europe into completely unfamiliar environment, culture, customs and language. That's challenging if one decides to stay, find friends and integrate properly. Doesn't help the language is French - one of the harder ones to learn well, IMHO a badly designed 'spaghetti code' of a language that needs desperate update from endless sets of old rules and exceptions. Then I picked up from 0 various mountain sports - from hiking to climbing and alpinism, ski touring, even flew paraglider for a while, also started free weights gym training. Diving in the sunny places with coral reefs. What spurred all this was a hard breakup and one guy who showed me the way to these activities and I walked it myself from that point.
Had a bad paragliding accident where I broke both legs (wheelchair perspective on life for 6 weeks was truly eye-opening experience), so I supplanted it with more climbing which I luckily can keep doing (ie this evening with my US buddy). You see the pattern - once these become your passions, its very hard to actually not wanting to do them more and more, they make me feel great long term, are super healthy and one sees world and life from other perspectives. As body ages I can move to other sports - planning starting wind surfing this summer as a replacement for that paragliding, fingers crossed.
When I compare myself with peers back home who literally never moved and stayed whole life in some comfy jobs its staggering how 'undeveloped' personalities many have - know only what few news websites say, repeat what others said, but not much experience outside their little bubble, no resilience, fear of unknown (of which for them in this world there are many). Hard to have any meaningful discussion about more than weather and kids with them, very shallow knowledge on whole world and life.
That on top of having and raising 2 kids with my wife with both busy careers, no nanny and all family 1500km away. I want to say I am busy but still, there is ton of time to slack off. TON of it. But some form of 'comfort zone', even if uncomfortable but at least familiar, is the proverbial death of a person, of that spark that makes you grin like a baby from time to time and feel joy of life. Or, more simply - if work is too much on you, work less, drop a day, leave earlier and screw what everybody else in office rat race thinks, they don't live your life.
Sorry trying to cram a lot of different ideas swirling in my head into one post and I am not a poet nor english native speaker.
Ever try waking up early and doing your work stuff before work?
Yes. I get my gym and novel writing done before work. But I lose steam at work very early. No bueno.
We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make a person deteriorate at any age. This is why solitary confinement is a cruel punishment.
> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market
Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities.
We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.
I think you should really look up the amount of work the average european peasant was doing in the middle ages, and the amount of free time they had off.
Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.
Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today...
Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.
"Free time" for a medieval peasant is a very misleading statistic, because it's only counting the amount of time that the peasants worked for their feudal lord - which was about as high as it could be, because of the amount of work that the peasants would have to do beyond that. Without modern technology, they had to gather firewood (I did this on the weekend and it's hard enough with chainsaws, a 4WD ute, a hydraulic log splitter - would take forever with an axe and mule cart), tend their own crops and livestock, mend and hand-wash their own clothes, work on their houses etc, which is all counted as time off work even though the peasant would die if they didn't do it.
The first couple of google results just seem to say your view is a very common mistake/misunderstanding people make when confusion "not working" with leisure time.
>Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.
Depeds on if they were the ones who had arrived in the land of abundance or not :)
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Irrelevant comparison. Completely apples to oranges existence. Its almost as if is a different species if you take in education, culture, health, food, society, knowledge etc.
On the other hand, ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces for people to congregate, socialize, and otherwise involve themselves with their communities
> ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces
For the elites. Most people in the population were doing back-breaking labor.
I'm not saying there wasn't leisure. But when most of a society's labor goes into agriculture, most of the leisure time is going to be spent on the farm with fellow farmhands. (The exception being winter months.)
Medieval serfs typically worked about 150 10 hour days a year.
In addition to the winter months there's a lot of gaps where the plants are in the ground, and now just need intermittent maintenance.
All of this of course ignores women's work, which was more omnipresent across the year. But it was also pretty social as well, hence the lasting power of phrases like "sewing circles".
FWIW: That 150 hour estimate came from work by Gregory Clark at UC Davis who has since cast doubt on it.
“There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told (Amanda Mill). He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-...
As for many things, there's a synthesis that seems more realistic here:
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-peasant/
Hint: it's not 150 days.
However, what the work time estimates are missing in this discussion is that you maintained relationships with all your neighbors and most of the village.
Exactly the opposite of the modern world, your work was solitary and your leisure time was social.
In my experience its really hard to find something that connects people of different age groups in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a workplace-like setting. Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work.
If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it.
It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
> Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
So true. I volunteer in an organisation with many older members, and a few of the older members have a thinly-veiled disdain for the younger people who don't contribute the same time and effort that they do... so some young people just stop turning up because they don't want some retiree with no life judging them for having a job, family commitments etc.
> Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work
Could the market itself be encouraging demographic segregation. If we measure and focus on economic growth above all else then the workplace becomes the place more important than all others.
My claim is, that the market is encouraging segregation less than society. Jobs force people to work together. If nobody forces them, they often just don't work together, and stay in their bubble.
It's kind of a six-of-one half-a-dozen-of-the-other situation IMO. Modern society does tend to have extreme social bubbles, but those are also a product of market forces, which in turn were influenced by previous states of society, etc etc back to the beginning of time.
Really? This just proves the point of the grandparent comment. I can think of at least three types of activities off the top of my head: sports (granted, not all of them, but definitely true for my sport - squash), music (playing an instrument in a group setting), and volunteering. I also know people who are in a bridge club with people twice their age.
There are still social activities connecting people of different age groups although I agree with the above comment that structurally the society we have has been eroding non-labour market interactions.
All three activities are hobbies. Things people mostly do when they feel good. It's nothing that gives life a purpose.
In the past a lot of activities connecting different age groups was a job or job-like too. Working on a farm or a family business together. Running a household and childcare together.
I disagree quite strongly. I derive a lot of meaning from these types of activities (in addition to family and friends of course) and zero meaning from my job. It's the narrow focus on work to the exclusion of everything else in life that is the problem - and that's what the comments above highlight.
I would suggest that it's the fact your job has no meaning to you that raises the meaning the other things have in your life. That's a good thing. When people really love their job, it lowers the meaning the other things have in their life (I won't say family, necessarily, though it can, but also things like hobbies or friends often suffer, because the job is all-encompassing).
There's only so much meaning one can feel in a life.
I take your point that there is a limit on meaningful activities one can undertake but I disagree that it's some kind of zero-sum situation. I used to find my work more meaningful and I don't think it made any other things less meaningful - I just felt that I spent more of my day doing things that meant something to me. Life, on the whole, can feel more or less meaningful; we don't distribute a fixed amount of meaning across all the things we do.
> Things people mostly do when they feel good.
This sounds like an inversion of cause and effect.
> All three activities are hobbies. [...] It's nothing that gives life a purpose.
I find this to be a dire outlook, myself.
Hustle culture. Everything has to have a purpose. Ideally commercial.
This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised.
No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in.
No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.
> No time for baking treats
> No time for being a governor at the local school
The way the internet talks about employment is so foreign compared to real life.
Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? Or volunteering at a school? My kids' school and all of my friends' kids' schools have parent-run boards and other organizations where most of the participants also have jobs.
Outside of the accounts I read on the internet, the many people I know in person have lives outside of their jobs. Having a job is the default state for most people, yet we're out here doing things and interacting with each other.
> No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
You people know that kids go to school during the workday, right? And that people teach their kids how to cook while also having jobs during the day?
This is all so weird to read as a parent. Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week
> Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats?
I don't mean occasionally. I mean as normal practice - no plastic-wrapped snacks at all other than an occasional chocolate.
> Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week
It depends where you live. If you're in a country with low population growth then the housing cost increase from 2-earner families isn't a big deal. You might be slightly lower down in the house affordability tier, but you will get a house. If you're not (e.g. the UK) you basically have to both work to get a dwelling.
And it also depends when you live. Gen Z are saying they can't get started, and don't expect to buy a house until well into their 30s. Current parents could buy in their late 20s, and their parents could in their early 20s. The trend is obvious, and its conclusion has arrived.
If you can do significant community-strengthening work while also doing a normally 40-hour-a-week job then I'd be pretty surprised. Maybe you only sleep 4 hours a night.
But it's all just work, all the ways down.
What you are describing is working for someone else, but the alternative, working for yourself, is definitely not the dreamy image all the people working for someone else thinks it is. Working for yourself is work + risk, albeit you get to chose (read: try to correctly identify) the work.
So no matter what, unless you want blob on the states dime, you are going to spend most of your life doing work.
They're not describing working for yourself? At least in terms of financial compensation. A job and some form of communal/familial uncompensated labor are extremely different in this context. Calling them both "work" in this context is muddying the waters.
I think what we've shed are more things like chairing a committee for the VFW, selling snacks at little league games, or being active in a lowers voice, looks over shoulder union. These are things that would traditionally take up the social slack left by not punching a clock every day, and we've eliminated them systematically to make room for more marketized activities. Today's retirees are "richer" than their parents were, so they can take cruises, travel, pursue expensive hobbies, etc. but they largely don't have a social context to make those things satisfying, and there are fewer grandkids to take care of than ever.
Most unions pay their elected officers and administrative staff. Members might volunteer for some activities but the roles that come with a significant time commitment are jobs like any other.
VFW membership has declined because even with continuous wars for decades, the end of conscription has meant a lot fewer veterans. And many VFW halls functioned more like dive bars than anything else: nothing wrong with that, but not particularly attractive to most younger veterans.
The VFW is just a stand-in for any community "lodge" type organization, all of which have been in decline for decades. Yes, this is somewhat about the "cool" factor -- young people largely don't want to be seen in a Moose Lodge, Elk Lodge, Lions Club, Masonic Temple, etc., and these organizations typically have backwards views on female membership, have racist histories (or presents), etc. -- but the fact remains that, instead of doing this community-oriented thing, people are doing other, market-oriented things. Instead of playing darts at the American Legion, they are paying to go to an escape room, or even just staying home and gaming or shopping on TikTok. Even country club membership is in decline, so this isn't only a working class phenomenon.
I'm not as sure what point you're making about union staff. Surely there has been paid union staff for decades -- no real change there AFAIK -- and being "active" in the union doesn't mean you are doing paid staff work (though part time positions for retirees aren't that uncommon). There's a lot of stuff going in on a truly active union local that is definitely not paid work: being on the committee that builds the 4th of July parade float, organizing the games for the summer member picnic, organizing a group to go work in union colors at a Habitat for Humanity build, putting together care packages for sick members and sending groups to visit with shut-in retirees. You're right that, sadly, few locals are this active anymore, but it was once common.
In what way have we "eliminated them systematically"? Maybe I haven't paid close enough attention, but it feels like those activities have (unfortunately) disappeared largely naturally.
Take this question a step further and ask _why_ those activities disappeared. What are those people who would previously have been doing that, now doing instead? Usually, the answer is working. For the unions, decades of policy have systematically eliminated them, but for the other points, it's more of a "between the lines" thing.
If you look at any society in history, those things disappearing is the opposite of natural.
While it's true that there are some positive factors causing it (e.g. housework has been made far easier through inventing/factorying/delivering/installing of appliances like vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dishwashers, and the world has just become easier and safer to be in for women through things such as reliable cars with power steering, mobile phone, and policemen who respond) there are a lot of negative factors that just push those time-rich, more society enriching-capable women into the world of work.
The main one being what I already mentioned: house prices force them to work to pay a bank back for paying a boomer a massive price for a house, to keep up with the other two-income house bids.
> But it's all just work, all the ways down.
> What you are describing is working for someone else
That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work.
But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.
I emphatically disagree. Baking treats is working for yourself? Taking care of the neighbors kids in turns is working for yourself? Are you saying that spending time having hobbies and participating in the local community is "work" and thus must also be as soul crushing as a 9-5 pushing pointless word documents?
None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.
I'm saying the community you envision in your head doesn't exist without the "crushing" 9-5. Every society ever has been people doing "crushing" work (albeit with some brief pockets of living comfortably on societal stockpile). Our comforts are the fruits of others "crushing" 9-5.
And sure, you can find a group of like minded people and go fully off grid, and live that life of "leisure". But your idea of leisure better be farming all day, being hungry with bland food all winter, and a gash on your toe being life threatening.
Usually when people conceptualize stuff like this, they do it on a personal level without consideration for what society on a whole would look like if everyone did it. If you keep digging, you find that 99% of people actually just want benefits of others work without working themselves. What a revelation!
It's an outcome of the expectation that people earn their living. People work less today than they used to, but a larger fraction of that work is paid.
And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her.
But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.
> "Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract."
I don't buy this. You can, for the purposes of your argument, reduce marriage to being something like an economic contract, that's fine; but, in reality, that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about.
Also, solving the burden of work for one sex isn't a solution. Granted, it's better than nothing.
> that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about
Ancient societies' marriages we have records about were principally about economics and politics.
Maybe the poor were having love marriages. We don't know because most of our sources couldn't be bothered with them. But to the degree we have evidence, it's in even poor landowners preferring to marry children off to the owners of adjoining plots. Like, maybe that's a coïncidence. But probably not.
Low sample size but two sets of ancestors from agricultural societies that married in the 1920s weren't especially happy together from what I've been told. One of the marriages was definitely a result of adjacent land though in neither case was it child of wealthy person getting married off to child of another wealthy person.
How do you suppose people in those times would even meet some love interest in a far away place, aka the next town over?
I mean, your kids also just didn't travel much farther than your neighbor's plots for the vast majority of their life.
If anything, political marriages are defined by a marriage outside your economic sphere of influence (which for ancient agricultural workers would generally be about a three day journey due to the ox problem), and to someone you don't know. These couples probably grew up together and went to social events like church together from birth.
> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce
What do you think people did with their lives before retirement became a thing? My great grandparents worked the fields and took care of the animals till they dropped. I did have one great grandma who spent the last few years of her life vegetating in a chair because she literally couldn’t do anything else, otherwise she’d have been working the fields and taking care of the animals.
They weren’t “economic entities” in the sense that they got a paycheck from an employer, but they were “economic entities” in that if they weren’t putting daily labor into the farm, they’d eventually freeze and starve.
This can be extended even further - hunter-gatherers never retired either. However in both cases people did actually _retire_ from direct activity. Elders would often become advisors and community nurturers rather than actively milking cows, hunting deer and whatnot.
I think here what becomes apparent is that it's not loss of specific activity (work) that causes the decline but activity in general which is very much duuuh - obviously.
Based on my grandmothers I’d say they mostly sat around and gossiped, went on walks together, ate meals together, did fun stuff together and then talked about stuff. Repeat until they die off.
Socializing with friends every day can be very fulfilling and doesn’t require to actually produce anything or do any work.
People don’t post about their daily 9-5 on instagram either.
I used to follow FIRE-related communities.
There were a depressing number of people who would post something along the lines of “I just pulled the trigger! Now what am I supposed to do to fill the time?” Your take is spot on, and it’s incredibly sad the number of people we’ve created whose only source of meaning or joy in their life is their desk job.
As someone who pulled the trigger about a year ago, I feel like there’s not enough hours in the day to fill with personally enriching activities, both mentally and physically stimulating. And I feel increasingly lucky to have a life like that.
I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours.
Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more to do than I have time for. The awesome part though is that now I can do all the "must do" (family time, personal health) and "should do" (hobbies, socializing) things, and pick and choose between the "nice to do" things. When I was working, I struggled to even do the "must do" things.
You are talking about retirement, yet I was working with people who couldn't stand the 2-week long annual leave (which is mandatory for every under contract of employment where I live) because they had nothing to do. 30, 40 years old people. It's terrifying.
> not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do
They aren't conditioned for it. Learning to relax, enjoy nature, prioritise friends and family, et cetera aren't hard coded like walking and talking. We benefit from it. But if you never learned to do it while your brain was most plastic, you probably aren't going to change because a number added a zero.
> I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do.
It's a common phenomenon in those communities because many of the participants are young (the E is for Early retirement).
The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money. Even many hobbies start to require money. Then reading books, browsing the internet, and playing games starts to get boring when it's your entire life.
The people that make it work usually take RE to mean “recreationally employed”. They aren’t sitting on a beach. They have a challenging project they are personally obsessed with that also generates income, but the income is largely just a way to keep score for them.
> recreationally employed
It is one of my greatest hope for everyone to be able to achieve this. It would shift the workplace dynamic so much that employers would have to work harder (beyond pizza parties) to retain employees since no one would blink an eye at the thought of resigning on the spot.
>doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money.
OTOH some have a lot of money.
They work their butts off as far up as they can in a place like a NY bank, then retire, early or not and join the yachting community :)
Sooner or later they find out that a one-day fishing trip is more work than a whole week of employment was, and they need more than a week to recover.
So you end up with a yachting community with most of the vessels just sitting there most of the time :\
> The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money.
Partition living expenses from hobby expenses, and once you have enough to not have to work for living expenses switch to doing just enough part-time to cover hobby expenses?
> Even many hobbies start to require money.
Hobbies require money, but a lot of hobbies don't require very much of it.
Yeah, if your primary hobbies are skiing and golfing and traveling and rebuilding 60s cars, that's not going to come cheap. But there is no shortage of much cheaper hobbies.
The tragedy is that people who are most likely to successfully FIRE have spent so long being laser-focused on making money to FIRE, that they neglected their (hobbies, social circle, health - underline as needed), so they find themselves in such a predicament.
Personally, I'd love to FIRE. I have at least 5-10 years of personal projects in my head that I would do if I didn't have a 9-5 job. Unfortunately, graduating into a shitty 2009 market and not having nepotism connections means I am unlikely to ever FIRE outside of some expat poverty FIRE in a cheap country.
FIRE isn't about job market, you can't control that. Though in tech most people are still making quite large incomes which does help.
Rather it is about controlling expenses. The thing you can actually control. My sister's family of 5 lives on less than 50k CAD / year, because they simply must (low income) so if one is making a 100k white collar salary (for example) one can live a lifestyle higher than hers while still banking 50k/an. Etc.
FIRE is definitely about income just as much as it is about being frugal and saving. Having a high income is what enables the RE part.
There is a base level beyond which you can't save much, so first order of business is maximizing your income (e.g. better job/raise/promotion) without going bananas and sacrificing your health for it.
I’ve noticed some people with seemingly fulfilling hobbies stop doing them after quitting their job as well. It’s entirely possible all those hobbies are valuable precisely as something powerful to latch onto and disconnect from the day job, and seem pointless the day after quitting. Seems like you had a strong sense of identity outside of your job already before quitting. Building that could be a lot of hard work for other people (and it sometimes comes as a surprise that it even needs to be built).
The largest FIRE sub on reddit is aptly named 'financial independence' because FI is much, much more important than RE.
The first post they link to on the sidebar is 'Build the life you want and save for it'
https://old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/58j8...
I honestly don't know how someone gets to the position of being able to retire without having thought long and hard about it. Even if you get an unexpected windfall, it's probably best to keep working until you know you're mentally prepared to retire.
I think the FIRE crowd is even more likely to fall into this trap than the average wage slave. In addition to finding meaning in their day job, they're also more likely to forego short-term costs (like recreation/socialization/travel/whatever). Plus the FIRE planning itself becomes a hobby. So when they retire, they "lose" even more than the average person who might have more side interests.
I really appreciate that perspective. There’s definitely an aspect of FIRE people being more inclined to sacrifice short-term meaning in order to retire earlier, that may contribute to not having spent time actually building the life they were wanting to live free of work in the first place. And it’s a great insight that FIRE itself is in many ways a hobby, and one that you somewhat inherently “lose” once you actually go through with it.
> Your take is spot on, and it’s incredibly sad the number of people we’ve created whose only source of meaning or joy in their life is their desk job.
I worked for a silicon valley company that graciously offered its employees a month or two of unpaid vacation every five years. And people who had worked there a long while agonized over it, if they should take it, and whatever should they do with all that free time??!?
Meanwhile, my European ass and my European colleagues were so incredibly bewildered by it, because we were used to 5-6 weeks of paid vacation per year, and being used to that means you have no issues finding stuff to do outside of work.
Corporate American produces the weirdest drones ever, people are so incredibly conditioned to work work work.
Those people are wildly un-creative.
Oh yes, absolutely. For hundreds of thousands of years, every elderly person had something like 8 children, 40 grandchildren and was busy with them.
Now, people fill this time with TV, because if they have kids, they live 5000 km away.
Every man I know that lived well into their 80's touching or breaking 90 were all active in some way. Once they stopped, they died shortly after. Though to be honest, they didn't stop by choice, usually from an injury or medical condition.
Very common story for a relatively minor injury or disease in an old person to snowball to their death when they lose mobility and independence. You gotta stay active if you want to keep living.
I know two men who landed in that situation, both of whom worked until their unfortunate incidents. One suffered a head injury at 84, the other a stroke at 86. Both were left with low mobility and mental facilities and died in under two years. And they still enjoyed working at that age, not because they had to.
I’m going to say there’s some mixup of causation and correlation here
Right, or possibly a third factor that people who work until they are older and people that have less cognitive decline older have in common. Like perhaps the kinds of jobs you can keep doing / or want to keep doing when you are older involve higher levels of education or more developed social networks that also correlate with longevity.
I think it is also more than that. In car-centric places like Brazil or the US, older people essentially need to drive or be driven around to have a social life. In pedestrian friendly cities like many in Europe, it is very common to see older people walking to meet their friends/relatives. I saw it all the time in Switzerland. Even those with severely limited mobility would prefer to actively walk or take the tram/bus somewhere (no matter how much time it took) than stay at home.
Can agree with this (to a certain extent). Spending time in both America and Ireland, there's a definite difference in the extent to which "I can only get there by car versus public transit/other types of transport" is incorporated into the culture. By far, more urban/suburban/rural density with appropriate public transportation support leads to more freedom to walk, bike, etc. Geographically, however, there are clear reasons why places like the US and Brazil have a strong incentive to rely on cars over anything else. Distance between cities and towns, poor public transport (esp. outside of urban areas in the US), etc. cause this to be an issue.
> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
What if people just really really like their jobs and didn't have enough initiative to make sure they had something to do outside of them? It isn't really wrong for people to like their work, like it isn't wrong for someone to have a hobby that they obsess over.
Considering fiction, even in the post scarcity society of Star Trek, people still like doing "jobs." Or consider a seeing eye dog after they retire, they enjoy occasionally putting the harness back on and feeling useful. It isn't simply a matter of human beings being reduced to economic entities.
Leasure is a skill! It must be trained like any other. You should ideally have some hobbies lined up.
I had a few years of relaxed work, and I had to learn to fill the extra time. It was not so hard for me, but it was lonelier than I expected at first.
My grandparents just bumped their volunteering from weekends to weekdays. Then my Boomer parents switched to leisure activities and travel (they stopped volunteering when they retired). I prefer my grandparent's retirement, but now that NGOs got professionalized and became extremely political that is a no-go for me. I didn't like to be bossed around by a 30yo narcissist driven by maxing out his EOY presentation (to keep their comfy job).
I'm considering to retire in a small town where distant relatives live and hopefully get busy by volunteering there somehow. But it's never that simple.
My fantasy is maybe to start a one person cafe operation and manage overheads.
Unfortunately most retail space in the US is way too oversized to make that kind of operation work.
Not sure what the current food truck climate is, but that angle might be a way to get something compact and 1-2 person sized. You could get a small caravan/trailer or stand and hire out for parties purely on weekends or just Saturdays to get it started ahead of schedule.
You hit the nail squarely on the head. In days past when people retired they'd still help raise kids or look after households. When we moved past requiring that sort of thing, we left the elderly without engagement.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but perhaps as a society we could be more intentional about creating roles where the elderly can still help and feel useful, but also have flexibility and a more relaxed lifestyle.
There's not necessarily money in it, but in the current era, parents still find the grandparents' availability for minding children incredibly useful. If they also cleaned my house free or cheap, I'd be thrilled!
I mean, we're about to enter a demographic reversal and to hear economists talk of it, corporations are going to really struggle to find the workers they need.
I guess we're about to find out if they're desperate enough to offer genuine flexibility or not.
If I could work 2d/wk remote as a software developer, I'd probably do it the rest of my life. Something tells me that most CEOs are still gonna insist on 50+hrs/wk RTO though...
They shouldn’t just feel useful, they need roles that actually are useful. They’re not dumb.
Of course, though I still think remembering that people need to feel useful is important. E.g. you don't want to force someone into a job that may be useful but the person is feeling "why am I doing this, it's not needed." The goal is also not to fill time or a money quota. It's to do something helpful such that the person actually feels helpful.
Either:
1. They are "dumb" and the original statement stands
2. They are not "dumb" and a role that is actually useful is a necessary condition for them feeling useful and the original statement stands.
There are useful roles that could either be done by a human or a machine and the machine is usually more efficient.
I retired recently in my late 40s (FIRE). Work was occasionally fulfilling, but mostly just a drag and when I didn't need it anymore, I was more than happy to stop. I've been raising my kids which is stimulation enough, but they are teens now and don't need such constant attention. Most of my other interests got swallowed up by career and kids and I don't really have the urge to go back to them. Actually thinking about going to grad school.
Hey I’m in the same boat! (Except the grad school.) feel free to email (in profile) if you want to chat.
I actually have the same fear. I love computers and I don't know what I'll do once I retire. Problem solving on computers is like oxygen to me.
Love computers outside of ${dayJob}!
Work on some open source projects and dig into some bugs, become that crazy but fun neighborhood guy always building some contraption in his garage, volunteer as a mentor for advanced STEM programs like FIRST FRC, volunteer at/run a local computer reuse program where you help take used computers and get them into a state people in need of one can use, build those things you always thought sounded fun to work on at ${dayJob} but could never "justify" to management, build and operate a retro computing collection.
Some of these scratch the tinkering itch, some of these scratch the community itch, some of these scratch the meaning itch, and so on, but all allow you to have a goal, sense of purpose, and to love computers however much you want without having to make money doing it.
Getting initial momentum on this can seem tricky, same as for careers, but once you get going the time at ${dayJob} starts to feel like it gets in the way of loving computers instead of the other way around.
You literally have one of the easiest things to retire to. You can do whatever you want with computers when you retire and for the rest of your life.
If you were an ER doctor and loved saving lives it would be a little harder.
Agreed! I love programming and have a bunch of side projects that realistically will only ever get anywhere close to completion once I'm retired.
Hear me out: you would get to choose which problems to solve!
But I get you; a job finds well-scoped problems and spoon feeds them to you, it can be daunting to look for a worthy problem to solve on your own. Think of it as a new skill you'll have to develop.
There's a big ocean of problem solving on computers that doesn't require a day job! I find it very fun. I mean I started on computers for fun when I was young and it turned into a job so being retired means I can just go back to working on the stuff I like in particular.
Honestly when given downtime I generate more computer problems than I could ever hope to solve. I cant even fathom being bored with a computer. My mother used to accuse me of breaking the home PC just to keep myself busy and it was not far from the truth.
I already do that now! Sometimes I break my workstation by experimenting with stuff then I have to reinstall everything from scratch again, and it's fun! Virtual high five for you.
I think this is a problem in perspective/framing. Or phrasing, if you will.
"Being economic entities in the workforce" could alternatively be phrased, "performing a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe."
That sounds much less sinister. It's something humans have been doing for millions of years. It feels good, it engages our brains, it's helpful to others, and it's helpful to ourselves. And I can't help but feel the modern "anti-capitalist" trend is unfair in its approach of disparaging it.
Of course, play and socializing are important, too! Life isn't all work and contribution. And there are many ways to work or contribute outside of having a formal job, anyway. So I do agree with you that it's a bit sad that people don't have ideas for how to do either of these things unless it's through their long-term career.
They were specifically talking about a commercial labor-for-money transaction though. Not just any useful work.
Multi-generation households - which also can keep older people active like you noted -are mostly gone. You can't do much for your tribe from a retirement home on a random Saturday afternoon every few months in summer, so work or hobbies are the remaining activity centers, but you now which of the 2 is lionized as a virtue in American culture. Some hobbies are unfortunately only discovered in retirement, so perhaps some criticism of the economic system as imperfect is due.
Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online.
I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.
[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
I don’t think being anti-capitalist necessitates being anti “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”. To me, that’s the big benefit- under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders.
I’m pretty sure the world overall and certainly “my tribe” would be better off if the job I’m working just never got done
> under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders
The first half of this sentence is false, but the second half is true.
I don't know about you, but when I look at my window every day, I see thousands of people working for their job: making delicious food that others can eat, stocking store shelves so others can shop, trimming trees so the city will look nice, driving trucks full of goods that others can have, designing good website UX for others to use better, repairing broken cars, etc. It's an intricate dance of millions of people waking up every day and doing selfless things for others in their tribe, in just the right amounts, because we've (miraculously) given them an incentive to do so.
To me what's depressing is that we can live in such a wonderful world, but with a cynical pessimistic culture in which it's commonplace to ignore the chief output of everyone's work.
Absolutely!
But also: with age more and more doors are closed to you. Many hobbies become inaccessible. You may end up with a bunch of choices that all just sound outright depressing. Losing a job is losing one more choice, restricting yourself to the possibly more boring options that you can still physically pull off.
It's just not fun being old.
Has society "created" those people? Or are some people just naturally subservient and need structure to come from somewhere else? I always assumed it was the latter.
>> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
Unless you own shares. A population dedicated to work, followed by a retirement dedicated to steady medical spending punctuated by occassional holiday travel, is ideal for sustained economic growth year on year.
It’s not that depressing if you view it as her wanting to help society and sees a job as the main way of achieving that.
When nobody is paying you to do something it’s easy to lose the feedback loop of “I’m at least providing this one person enough value to keep getting paid”.
This is much older than capitalism too. Very old religions derive value from work
This
For most, work in America seems inherently undignified.
It's definitely polarizing, I think a lot of people feel that work is your life's purpose.
Authoritarian hierarchies (Which is precisely what your workplace is) rarely have dignity to spare for the people building the pharaoh's pyramid.
That sounds exactly like it's a problem with retirement.
Do you have anything more interesting to say on the topic than "No U wrong"? The OP had a lot of thoughtful comments about the issues with having things to do after retiring.
Or maybe it’s a problem of spending all your effort working a job for 40+ years, and having your curiosity atrophy into nothingness.
I retired last year in my late 30’s and it’s just such a life upgrade. I study Mandarin, go to the gym, cook fun meals, volunteer at our community garden, volunteer at our food pantry, go to board game nights, brew beer, DIY house maintenance, write some software for myself for fun, etc. I have so much more time to spend learning new things, it’s ridiculous. I just can’t even fathom continuing to do a job I don’t particularly enjoy just because I’m too unimaginative to figure out what I’d do with the extra 40+ hours of weekly freedom.
My thoughts exactly. Maybe I'm just wired differently, but if I couldn't work anymore or didn't need to I'd be like "Finally! I can spend as much time as I need to make yeast glow with CRISPR, collect microscopic things, build a chicken coop, learn to fly planes, build a bigger coil gun, actually get proficient at speaking German, go to more pub trivia, build a new Dobsonian telescope, yada yada." And I'm bet someone would say "you're not really gonna do all those things." Well, you're wrong. Those are the sorts of things I've done since I was a kid. I would just have so much more time to do them. There is no way I would retire and have nothing to do.
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I've been doing sort of a temporary version of that :). I quit working for the next year or maybe some more to focus on a big house renovation project, among other things (a few major car, truck, and tractor projects too.. some welding.. building some other machinery..). I figured why wait until some indefinite future to do work that is actually personally meaningful rather than what an employer tells me to do? I guess financially this year of negative income has some opportunity cost associated with it, but I'm building a bunch of stuff that cannot be bought, and I'd rather take the time now when it's definitely good than wait for a "maybe". And frankly the tech treadmill had pretty well erased the interest I used to have in computing. I'm also quite happy to be sitting out the current AI insanity. I've been working on some personal coding projects as well--as well as playing with local LLMs--to stay current and hopefully rekindle the interest in computing that the industry beat out of me. The work used to be fun, where did that go?
It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives
Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
That's not true. There were always different roles for older people. They didn't just keep doing the same job their whole lives.
And people who were injured to the point where they couldn't "work" anymore were still cared for by their community.
I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed.
Yes, humanity is full of various societies that do things differently. These ideas aren't disney-fied - they're just accurate representations of the fact that people care for each other, most of the time.
I appreciate your anecdote, but here's a few counter-examples:
- Neanderthals took care of their elderly: https://theconversation.com/neanderthals-cared-for-each-othe...
- Neanderthals took care of a child that likely had a developmental condition: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn9310
- other Hominids also did this at some point in the last few million years: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/deformed-...
- 2500 year old woman had a jaw prosthetic made: https://www.vice.com/en/article/mummified-skull-reveals-iron...
- 15k years ago, someone with a broken femur was cared for well enough to heal: https://www.forbes.com/sites/remyblumenfeld/2020/03/21/how-a...
- Neanderthals pre-chewed food or provided soft foods for someone who lost their teeth: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/care-worn-fossils
- 4000 years ago, a man who was almost certainly a quadraplegic was still being cared for: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/8788963...
They're right. We've found remains that show how thousands of years ago people took care of people that would have died without external assistance.
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-patagonian-hunter-disa...
Unspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus
Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.
Not when basics like rent, food, and healthcare eat up the majority of that 45k
There's only so much you can reduce your lifestyle before you're literally just living to work anyways
The US has one of the highest median incomes adjusted for cost of living in the world:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
(You're welcome to complain. I'm just clarifying that insofar as this is a problem, it is very much not exclusive to the United States.)
That's literally every society
Hyperbolic. Unless she has a second job she surely has other activities to occupy her 50-80 non working, non sleeping hours. She's making the much weaker statement that dropping from e.g. 40 hours of economically productive and legible work to zero would leave her worse off, and that's much more understandable.
Most of the people who get a lot out of retirement are still doing economically productive work, it's just illegible to the point they don't feel it's worth bothering to make a buck off it. Any serious hobby is basically a second job you don't get paid for, in other words.